Case study of the Falcon code project

  • Authors:

  • D. E. Post;R. P. Kendall;E. M. Whitney

  • Affiliations:

  • Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM;Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM;Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the second international workshop on Software engineering for high performance computing system applications
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

The field of computational science is growing rapidly. Yet there have been few detailed studies of the development processes for high performance computing applications. As part of the High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program we are conducting a series of case studies of representative computational science projects to identify the steps involved in developing such applications, including the life cycle, workflows and tasks, and technical and organizational challenges. We are seeking to identify how software development tools are used and the enhancements that would increase the productivity of code developers. The studies are also designed to develop a set of "lessons learned" that can be transferred to the general computational science community to improve the code development process. We have carried a detailed study of the Falcon (Fig.1) code project. That project is located at a large institution under contract to a national sponsor. The project team consisted of about 15 scientists charged with developing a multi-physics simulation that would utilize large-scale supercomputers with 1000s of processors. The expected life time of the code project is about 30 years. The case study findings reinforced the importance of sound software project management and the challenges associated with verification and validation.